If the problem of the origin of life is conceptualized as a process of emergence of biochemistry from proto-biochemistry, which in turn emerged from the organic chemistry and geochemistry of primitive earth, then the resources of the new sciences of complex systems dynamics can provide a more robust conceptual framework within which to explore the possible pathways of chemical complexification leading to living systems and biosemiosis. In such a view the emergence of life, and concomitantly of natural selection and biosemiosis, (...) is the result of deep natural laws (the outlines of which we are only beginning to perceive) and reflects a degree of holism in those systems that led to life. Further, such an approach may lead to the development of a more general theory of biology and of natural organization, one informed by semiotic concepts. (shrink)

The design argument was rebutted by David Hume. He argued that the world and its contents (such as organisms) were not analogous to human artifacts. Hume further suggested that there were equally plausible alternatives to design to explain the organized complexity of the cosmos, such as random processes in multiple universes, or that matter could have inherent properties to self-organize, absent any external crafting. William Paley, writing after Hume, argued that the functional complexity of living beings, however, defied naturalistic explanations. (...) In effect he dared anyone to come up with an alternative to his inference to design, and hence a designer, outside of nature. Charles Darwin explained the apparent design of functional complexity by his theory of natural selection. Asa Gray, however, in essays as well as in correspondence with Darwin argued that natural selection allowed for a type of ‘evolutionary teleology’ in which design at most could be considered the result of universal principles. F.E. Hicks updated Hume by specifically objecting to the use of design arguments by Paley. Hicks argued that the apparent design seen in nature reflected order at a deep level in nature. The design argument was briefly revived by Lawrence Henderson early in the twentieth century but he ultimately concluded that design and teleology were not necessarily mutually entailing and he retracted his design argument in favor of one that he termed ‘natural teleology’. The current claims of ‘intelligent design’ have the same logical problems that have beset previous design arguments. If design is divorced from teleology and its discontents put behind us, then there is a possibility that the latter can have a place in the development of theories to explain the phenomena of emergent complexity. (shrink)

The design argument was rebutted by David Hume. He argued that the world and its contents (such as organisms) were not analogous to human artifacts. Hume further suggested that there were equally plausible alternatives to design to explain the organized complexity of the cosmos, such as random processes in multiple universes, or that matter could have inherent properties to self-organize, absent any external crafting. William Paley, writing after Hume, argued that the functional complexity of living beings, however, defied naturalistic explanations. (...) In effect he dared anyone to come up with an alternative to his inference to design, and hence a designer, outside of nature. Charles Darwin explained the apparent design of functional complexity by his theory of natural selection. Asa Gray, however, in essays as well as in correspondence with Darwin argued that natural selection allowed for a type of ' evolutionary teleology' in which design at most could be considered the result of universal principles. F. E. Hicks updated Hume by specifically objecting to the use of design arguments by Paley. Hicks argued that the apparent design seen in nature reflected order at a deep level in nature. The design argument was briefly revived by Lawrence Henderson early in the twentieth century but he ultimately concluded that design and teleology were not necessarily mutually entailing and he retracted his design argument in favor of one that he termed ' natural teleology'. The current claims of ' intelligent design' have the same logical problems that have beset previous design arguments. If design is divorced from teleology and its discontents put behind us, then there is a possibility that the latter can have a place in the development of theories to explain the phenomena of emergent complexity. (shrink)

Nagel’s official model of theory-reduction and the way it is represented in the literature are shown to be incompatible with the careful remarks on the notion of reduction Nagel gave while developing his model. Based on these remarks, an alternative model is outlined which does not face some of the problems the official model faces. Taking the context in which Nagel developed his model into account, it is shown that the way Nagel shaped his model and, thus, its well-known deficiencies, (...) are best conceived of as a mere by-product of his philosophical background. (shrink)

One of the most plausible and widely discussed examples of strong emergence is molecular structure. The only detailed account of it, which has been very influential, is due to Robin Hendry and is formulated in terms of downward causation. This paper explains Hendry’s account of the strong emergence of molecular structure and argues that it is coherent only if one assumes a diachronic reflexive notion of downward causation. However, in the context of this notion of downward causation, the strong emergence (...) of molecular structure faces three challenges that have not been met and which have so far remained unnoticed. First, the putative empirical evidence presented for the strong emergence of molecular structure equally undermines supervenience, which is one of the main tenets of strong emergence. Secondly, it is ambiguous how the assumption of determinate nuclear positions is invoked for the support of strong emergence, as the role of this assumption in Hendry’s argument can be interpreted in more than one way. Lastly, there are understandings of causation which render the postulation of a downward causal relation between a molecule’s structure and its quantum mechanical entities, untenable. (shrink)

While the fundamental laws of physics are time-reversal invariant, most macroscopic processes are irreversible. Given that the fundamental laws are taken to underpin all other processes, how can the fundamental time-symmetry be reconciled with the asymmetry manifest elsewhere? In statistical mechanics, progress can be made with this question. What I dub the ‘Zwanzig–Zeh–Wallace framework’ can be used to construct the irreversible equations of SM from the underlying microdynamics. Yet this framework uses coarse-graining, a procedure that has faced much criticism. I (...) focus on two objections in the literature: claims that coarse-graining makes time-asymmetry ‘illusory’ and ‘anthropocentric’. I argue that these objections arise from an unsatisfactory justification of coarse-graining prevalent in the literature, rather than from coarse-graining itself. This justification relies on the idea of measurement imprecision. By considering the role that abstraction and autonomy play, I provide an alternative justification and offer replies to the illusory and anthropocentric objections. Finally, I consider the broader consequences of this alternative justification: the connection to debates about inter-theoretic reduction and the implication that the time-asymmetry in SM is weakly emergent. 1Introduction 1.1Prospectus2The Zwanzig–Zeh–Wallace Framework3Why Does This Method Work? 3.1The special conditions account3.2When is a density forwards-compatible?4Anthropocentrism and Illusion: Two Objections 4.1The two objections in more detail4.2Against the justification by measurement imprecision5An Alternative Justification 5.1Abstraction and autonomy5.2An illustration: the Game of Life6Reply to Illusory7Reply to Anthropocentric8The Wider Landscape: Concluding Remarks 8.1Inter-theoretic relations8.2The nature of irreversibility. (shrink)

A critical notice of David J. Chalmers, Constructing the World (Oxford University Press,2012).

Although the literature on the issue of pluralism within the philosophy of science is very extensive, this paper focuses on the metaphysical causal pluralism that emerges from the new mechanistic discussion on causality. The main aim is to situate the new mechanistic views on causation within the account of varieties of causal pluralism framed by Psillos ( 2009 ). Paying attention to his taxonomy of metaphysical views on causation (i.e., the straightjacket view, the functional view, the two-concept view, the agnostic (...) view and the atheist view) will help clarify differences in opinion and, at the same time, make it possible to elucidate the main metaphysical theses present within the new mechanistic debate. Special attention is given to S. Glennan’s theory of causation, since it is unique in offering an overall metaphysical view of the issue. It is also argued that mechanists are not “atheists” on causation: while all of them are causal realists, most mechanists are “agnostic” on causation, with a few exceptions such as S. Glennan, P. Machamer and J. Bogen. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungNicht erst seit Ruth Macklins einflussreichem Aufsatz „Dignity is a useless concept“ ist eine breite Debatte um Sinn und Unsinn des Begriffs der Menschenwürde in der Medizinethik entbrannt. In diesem Beitrag möchte ich mein Augenmerk auf die von Macklin prominent gemachte Substitutionsthese richten. In ihrer einflussreich gewordenen Fassung propagiert diese eine Ersetzung des Menschenwürdebegriffs durch denjenigen der Autonomie. Doch was ist damit genau gemeint? – Ausgehend von einer Analyse von Macklins Argumenten möchte ich zeigen, unter welchen Bedingungen die Substitutionsthese die (...) von ihren Vertretern häufig in den Vordergrund gestellten eleminativen Ergebnisse zeitigt – die Rede von einem eigenständigen begrifflichen Gehalt von „Würde“ sollte aufgegeben werden. Im Verlauf der Untersuchung werden auch die Vorzüge einer solchen Position gegenüber stärker eliminativ auftretenden Standpunkten und Positionen deutlich, die den Ausdruck als berechtigt, aber unanalysierbar betrachten. (shrink)

Nicht erst seit Ruth Macklins einflussreichem Aufsatz „Dignity is a useless concept“ ist eine breite Debatte um Sinn und Unsinn des Begriffs der Menschenwürde in der Medizinethik entbrannt. In diesem Beitrag möchte ich mein Augenmerk auf die von Macklin prominent gemachte Substitutionsthese richten. In ihrer einflussreich gewordenen Fassung propagiert diese eine Ersetzung des Menschenwürdebegriffs durch denjenigen der Autonomie. Doch was ist damit genau gemeint? – Ausgehend von einer Analyse von Macklins Argumenten möchte ich zeigen, unter welchen Bedingungen die Substitutionsthese die (...) von ihren Vertretern häufig in den Vordergrund gestellten eleminativen Ergebnisse zeitigt – die Rede von einem eigenständigen begrifflichen Gehalt von „Würde“ sollte aufgegeben werden. Im Verlauf der Untersuchung werden auch die Vorzüge einer solchen Position gegenüber stärker eliminativ auftretenden Standpunkten und Positionen deutlich, die den Ausdruck als berechtigt, aber unanalysierbar betrachten. (shrink)

The principle of Summation, which is a technically sharpened version of the familiar claim that a whole is a sum of its parts, is presented by Peter van Inwagen as a trivial truth. I argue to the contrary, that it is incompatible with the natural assumption that a whole may gain or lose parts non-instantaneously. For, as I show, the latter assumption implies that something can be determinately a whole without being determinately a sum of parts, and this, in turn, (...) indicates the falsity of Summation. I point out that the tension between Summation and the possibility of non-instantaneous gain or loss of parts compels us to rethink the relations between the concepts of whole and sum, and may have far reaching consequences for the mereology of physical objects. (shrink)

Beginning with Anderson, spontaneous symmetry breaking in infinite quantum systems is often put forward as an example of emergence in physics, since in theory no finite system should display it. Even the correspondence between theory and reality is at stake here, since numerous real materials show ssb in their ground states, although they are finite. Thus against what is sometimes called ‘Earman's Principle’, a genuine physical effect seems theoretically recovered only in some idealisation, disappearing as soon as the idealisation is (...) removed.We review the well-known arguments that no finite system can exhibit ssb, using the formalism of algebraic quantum theory in order to control the thermodynamic limit and unify the description of finite- and infinite-volume systems. Using the striking mathematical analogy between the thermodynamic limit and the classical limit, we show that a similar situation obtains in quantum mechanics versus classical mechanics.This discrepancy between formalism and reality is quite similar to the measurement problem, and hence we address it in the same way, adapting an argument of the Landsman and Reuvers that was originally intended to explain the collapse of the wave-function within conventional quantum mechanics. Namely, exponential sensitivity to perturbations of the dynamics as the system size increases causes symmetry breaking already in finite but very large quantum systems. This provides continuity between finite- and infinite-volume descriptions of quantum systems featuring ssb and hence restores Earman's Principle. (shrink)

I investigate the relationship between adaptation, as defined in evolutionary theory through natural selection, and the concept of emergence. I argue that there is an essential correlation between the former, and “emergence” defined in the field of algorithmic simulations. I first show that the computational concept of emergence (in terms of incompressible simulation) can be correlated with a causal criterion of emergence (in terms of the specificity of the explanation of global patterns). On this ground, I argue that emergence in (...) general involves some sort of selective processes. Finally, I show that a second criterion, concerning novel explanatory regularities following the emergence of a pattern, captures the robustness of emergence displayed by some cases of emergence (according to the first criterion). Emergent processes fulfilling both criteria are therefore exemplified in evolutionary biology by some so-called “innovations”, and mostly by the new units of fitness or new kinds of adaptations (like sexual reproduction, multicellular organisms, cells, societies) sometimes called “major transitions in evolution”, that recent research programs (Maynard-Smith and Szathmary 1995 ; Michod 1999 ) aims at explaining. (shrink)

Among many properties distinguishing emergence, such as novelty, irreducibility and unpredictability, computational accounts of emergence in terms of computational incompressibility aim first at making sense of such unpredictability. Those accounts prove to be more objective than usual accounts in terms of levels of mereology, which often face objections of being too epistemic. The present paper defends computational accounts against some objections, and develops what such notions bring to the usual idea of unpredictability. I distinguish the objective unpredictability, compatible with determinism (...) and entailed by emergence, and various possibilities of predictability at emergent levels. This makes sense of practices common in complex systems studies that forge qualitative predictions on the basis of comparisons of simulations with multiple values of parameters. I consider robustness analysis as a way to ensure the ontological character of computational emergence. Finally, I focus on the property of novelty, as it is displayed by biological evolution, and ask whether computer simulations of evolution can produce the same kind of emergence as the open-ended evolution attested in Phanerozoic records. (shrink)

Most contemporary philosophers of mind claim to be in search of a 'naturalistic' theory. However, when we look more closely, we find that there are a number of different and even conflicting ideas of what would count as a 'naturalization' of the mind. This article attempts to show what various naturalistic philosophies of mind have in common, and also how they differ from one another. Additionally, it explores the differences between naturalistic philosophies of mind and naturalisms found in ethics, epistemology, (...) and philosophy of science. Section 1 introduces a distinction between two types of project that have been styled 'naturalistic', which I call philosophical naturalism and empirical naturalism . Sections 2 to 6 canvass different strands of philosophical naturalism concerning the mind, followed by a much briefer discussion of attempts to provide empirical naturalizations of the mind in Section 7 . Section 8 concludes the essay with a consideration of the relations between philosophical and empirical naturalism in philosophy of mind, arguing that at least some types of philosophical naturalism are incompatible with empirical naturalism. (shrink)

Recent philosophical discourse on emergence has developed with particular concern for the distinction between weak and strong emergence and with the primary focus on detailed analysis of the concept of supervenience. However, in the last decade and as a new departure, attention has been devoted to the distinction between synchronic and diachronic emergence. In this philosophical context, there is an ongoing general belief that these two concepts are so different that it is impossible to establish for them a general unifying (...) framework. It is the purpose of this paper to support an alternative view, i.e. that these concepts are different but not mutually exclusive, and that attending to appearance and persistence can, in this context, lead to an acceptable unifying framework for these two, differing concepts of emergence. (shrink)

The topic of mechanistic explanation in neuroscience has been a subject of recent discussion. There is a lot of interest in understanding what these explanations involve. Furthermore, there is disagreement about whether neurological mechanisms themselves should be viewed as reductionist in nature. In this paper I will explain how these two issues are related. I will, first, describe how mechanisms support a form of antireductionism. This is because the mechanisms that exist should be seen as involving part-whole relations, where the (...) behavior of a whole is more than the sum of its parts. After this, I will consider mechanistic explanations and how they can be understood. While some people think the explanations concern existing entities in the world, I will argue that we can understand the explanations by viewing them in terms of arguments. Despite the fact that it is possible to understand mechanistic explanations in this manner, the antireductionist point remains. (shrink)

Many epistemic anomalies of the neoclassical research programme originate from its ontologically reductionist meta-axioms, which predicate how economic macro-systems are constituted from their micr...

We provide a taxonomy of the two most important debates in the philosophy of the cognitive and neural sciences. The first debate is over methodological individualism: is the object of the cognitive and neural sciences the brain, the whole animal, or the animal--environment system? The second is over explanatory style: should explanation in cognitive and neural science be reductionist-mechanistic, inter-level mechanistic, or dynamical? After setting out the debates, we discuss the ways in which they are interconnected. Finally, we make some (...) recommendations that we hope will help philosophers interested in the cognitive and neural sciences to avoid dead ends. (shrink)

This is one of two papers about emergence, reduction and supervenience. It expounds these notions and analyses the general relations between them. The companion paper analyses the situation in physics, especially limiting relations between physical theories. I shall take emergence as behaviour that is novel and robust relative to some comparison class. I shall take reduction as deduction using appropriate auxiliary definitions. And I shall take supervenience as a weakening of reduction, viz. to allow infinitely long definitions. The overall claim (...) of this paper will be that emergence is logically independent both of reduction and of supervenience. In particular, one can have emergence with reduction, as well as without it; and emergence without supervenience, as well as with it. Of the subsidiary claims, the four main ones are: : I defend the traditional Nagelian conception of reduction ; : I deny that the multiple realizability argument causes trouble for reductions, or ``reductionism'' ; : I stress the collapse of supervenience into deduction via Beth's theorem ; : I adapt some examples already in the literature to show supervenience without emergence and vice versa. (shrink)

Emergent antireductionism in biological sciences states that even though all living cells and organisms are composed of molecules, molecular wholes are characterized by emergent properties that can only be understood from the perspective of cellular and organismal levels of composition. Thus, an emergence claim (molecular wholes are characterized by emergent properties) is thought to support a form of antireductionism (properties of higher-level molecular wholes can only be understood by taking into account concepts, theories and explanations dealing with higher-level entities). I (...) argue that this argument is flawed: even if molecular wholes are characterized by emergent properties and even if many successful explanations in biology are not molecular, there is no entailment between the two claims. (shrink)

O presente paper integra o projeto de pesquisa que estou desenvolvendo, e cuja finalidade é a de erigir um modelo teórico dedicado ao clássico e sempre reinventado ‘problema das relações mente-corpo’. O estágio atual desta pesquisa se dedica a conciliar uma perspectiva emergentista das propriedades mentais com a tese de que a mente emerge das indissociáveis relações de interação e de integração entre encéfalo, corpo-propriamente-dito e meio-ambiente. Para tanto, buscarei demarcar as razões para defender uma abordagem que seja monista e, (...) ao mesmo tempo, incompatível com as perspectivas fisicalistas que aderiram em maior ou menor grau ao programa reducionista. Como pretendo sustentar, a perspectiva emergentista é a que melhor se adequa a essas exigências. Em sentido diverso do fisicalismo reducionista, proponho a defesa de um fisicalismo centrado nas noções de complexidade e de irredutibilidade das propriedades emergentes. (shrink)

An overview of: "Why Red Doesn't Sound Like a Bell. Understanding the feel of consciousness".

This thesis investigates the epistemological and metaphysical relations between chemistry and quantum mechanics. These relations are examined with respect to how chemistry and quantum mechanics each describe a single inert molecule. A review of how these relations are understood in the literature shows that there is a proliferation of positions which focus on how chemistry is separate from quantum mechanics. This proliferation is accompanied by a tendency within the philosophy of chemistry community to connect the legitimacy of the field with (...) the autonomy of chemistry. First, it is argued that this connection should not be made. Secondly, it is argued that chemistry and quantum mechanics are unified in accordance with Harold Kincaid’s model of non-reductive unity because the two theories exhibit particular epistemic and metaphysical interconnections. Thirdly, a metaphysical account is examined which is incompatible with Kincaid’s model of unity; namely strong emergence as understood by Robin Hendry. According to Hendry, the structure of a single inert molecule strongly emerges from its quantum mechanical entities in the sense that there is downward causation. However, Hendry’s defense of this account faces certain problems. Moreover, the putative empirical evidence for his understanding of strong emergence can be explained without invoking strong emergence. This is shown by considering how quantum mechanics assumes an idealized understanding of a molecule’s stability and structure. In the light of the philosophical literature on idealizations, this idealization can be interpreted in two different ways, both of which explain why quantum mechanics describes the structure of a single molecule the way it does, without assuming strong emergence in Hendry’s sense. Each interpretation has philosophical implications regarding the nature of chemical properties, and the relation of chemistry and quantum mechanics. These implications are consistent with Kincaid’s model of unity and thus further support chemistry’s unity with quantum mechanics (as per Kincaid). (shrink)

The importance of the exclusion argument for contemporary physicalism is emphasized. The recent attempts to vindicate reductive physicalism by invoking certain needed revisions to the Nagelian model of reduction are then discussed. It is argued that such revised views of reduction offer in fact much less help to reductive physicalism than is sometimes supposed, and that many of these views lead to trouble when combined with the exclusion argument.

p style="text-indent: 0cm; line-height: normal" class="MsoBodyTextIndent3"span style="font-size: 11pt"In this paper, I argue that starting with the organelles that constitute a cellmdash;and continuing up the hierarchy of components in processes and subsystems of an organismmdash;there exist clear instances of emergent biological phenomena that can be considered ldquo;livingrdquo; entities.spannbsp; /spanThese components and their attending processes are living emergent phenomena because of the way in which the components are organized to maintain homeostasis of the organism at the various levels in the hierarchy.spannbsp; /spanI (...) call this view the emhomeostatic organization view/em of biological phenomena, and, as is shown, it comports well with the standard philosophical accounts of nomological emergence and representational emergence.spannbsp; /spanTo proffer HOV, I describe properties of biological entities that include internal-hierarchical data exchange, data selectivity, informational integration, and environmental-organismic information exchange.spannbsp; /spanFurther, a distinction is drawn between particularized homeostasis and generalized homeostasis, and I argue that because the various processes and subsystems of an organism are functioning properly in their internal environments, the organism is able to exist as a hierarchically-organized entity in some environment external to it.spannbsp; /spanStated simply: that components of biological phenomena are organized to perform some function resulting in homeostasis marks them out to be living emergent entities distinguishable, in description and in reality, from the very physico-chemical processes of which they are composed./span/p p style="text-indent: 0cm; line-height: normal" class="MsoBodyTextIndent3"span style="font-size: 11pt"nbsp;/span/p. (shrink)

I deny that the world is fundamentally causal, deriving the skepticism on non-Humean grounds from our enduring failures to find a contingent, universal principle of causality that holds true of our science. I explain the prevalence and fertility of causal notions in science by arguing that a causal character for many sciences can be recovered, when they are restricted to appropriately hospitable domains. There they conform to loose and varying collections of causal notions that form folk sciences of causation. This (...) recovery of causation exploits the same generative power of reduction relations that allows us to recover gravity as a force from Einstein's general relativity and heat as a conserved fluid, the caloric, from modern thermal physics, when each theory is restricted to appropriate domains. Causes are real in science to the same degree as caloric and gravitational forces. (shrink)

This thesis uses Manuel DeLanda's realist emergentist ontology to indicate a foundation for an ethics of open possibility and experimentation. DeLanda's emergentist ontology will be used as a bridge that links nature as a creative system to human life as self-consciously creative. As an emergent goal of human life as such, personal experimentation has an irreducibly ethical dimension. I will argue that John Russon's concept of mutual equal recognition or universality-as-sharedness best explicates the ethical implications implied by but not explored (...) in the work of DeLanda. Chapter 1 is a general introduction and lays out the three competing views to which this thesis is opposed and to which it offers an alternative. Chapter 2 explains the meaning and implications of DeLanda's conception of natural processes as creative, suggesting that there are ethical implications for how we ought to live life if reality is as DeLanda claims. These ethical implications are emergent properties of natural and social organisation. Thus, Chapter 3 will look at a selection of material from other contemporary thinkers on emergence, aiming to bring DeLanda's conception into further relief and explain its unique appropriateness for the ethical implications this thesis is explicating. In Chapter 4, the ethical implications of DeLanda's ontology will be made fully explicit. I will demonstrate how Russon's principle of mutual equal recognition is an emergent property of human history and, as such, the social foundation for the ethics of personal experimentation and open possibility implied by but not explicated in DeLanda's ontology. (shrink)

This essay considers the prospects of modeling spacetime as a phenomenon that emerges in the low-energy limit of a quantum liquid. It evaluates three examples of spacetime analogues in condensed matter systems that have appeared in the recent physics literature, indicating the extent to which they are viable, and considers what they suggest about the nature of spacetime.